The human imagination is infinite. Not even the most sophisticated machines can understand this.
— NORMA CENVA,
thoughts recorded and deciphered by Adrien Cenva
At the edge of a trance but not quite there, Norma chewed two more melange capsules. The essence of spice filled her mouth and nostrils, made her eyes water. Then, in her mind, she traveled far from Kolhar….
The Great Purge continued across the Synchronized Worlds. She knew that bombing raids were obliterating the fringe Omnius incarnations in lightning ambushes. Machine-dominated planets were dying, strike after strike, before the rest of the everminds knew what was happening.
Her space-folding technology made it possible.
But instead of complete pride, Norma sensed a deep disturbance in her psyche. Strange echoes of disaster tumbled through her spice-induced visions, and she felt terrible guilt.
Since she had never adequately solved the spacefolder navigation problem, many soldiers were losing their lives. Each time the battle groups jumped from one target to the next, their numbers were decimated. And decimated again before they reached the next target. Oh, the incredible cost!
In her perfect, beautiful body, looking like an avenging angel, Norma stood alone on one of the vast, flat rooftops of the spacefolder assembly plant. She gazed up at a night sky filled with glistening stars and bright planets. Some of them were League Worlds, others dominated by thinking machines… still others were now radioactive cinders, completely dead.
The vast distances called to her. A cool breeze blew her long blond hair behind her. Norma had figured out a way to bridge the entire galaxy, folding the fabric of space. Every star system she could see, and more, now lay within the range of human exploration. The Holtzman engines worked, as she’d known they would. But an elusive something lay beyond her grasp.
My ships are still flawed.
With her body so saturated with melange, she rarely slept anymore, not the way she had as a small child in the warm caves on Rossak. In those days, she’d gone to bed with few problems on her mind, even though her mother rarely paid any attention to her. To compensate for Zufa’s disapproval, the girl had retreated into other realms, dabbling with mathematics so esoteric that they approached the realm between physics and philosophy.
With help and encouragement from Aurelius, important ideas had begun to trickle into Norma’s hungry, receptive brain, like the first droplets of water in an eventual ocean. By the time she was seven years old, as the reservoir of her intellect filled, she always went to bed with her mind brimming with problems or challenging mental exercises; many solutions danced closer in the half-waking fugue state just before sleep took her, and she rarely woke up without having considered them in detail.
Now, somewhere behind her, she heard the whine of a Holtzman engine as workers tested it inside one of the buildings. As she focused on the sound, it grew more distant. Pulsing through her tissues, the massive dose of melange soothed her, muffling sensory perceptions while heightening other abilities. Gradually the distracting sound faded entirely, and she no longer felt the cool breeze, either. She seemed to drift upward in her thoughts, into the starfield.
Out there, ship after ship in the Jihad fleet folded space and plunged across dimensions from one Synchronized World to the next. Now, in her mind, she heard another crew vanish and die, their souls torn apart— because she could not help them find their way. She wished the Supreme Commander had been able to install her forbidden computer systems in more than his twelve primary ships. If a computer was designed to assist in the destruction of Omnius, was it still inherently evil?
Or perhaps she should have designed paths for them, made the fleet’s jumps shorter, across more predictable lines of space. It would be like a sprint, covering safe distances in a flash, and then moving more slowly across uncharted jumps. But such caution would cost a great deal of time. Time! The Army of the Jihad did not have that commodity.
Her vision remained vivid, letting her see the nuclear storms dropped by the League ships, hurricanes of pulse-atomics that devastated the Omnius enclaves…. Human captives cheered at first and then saw that they too were doomed.
Another machine world gone, another Omnius erased. But with each transit through folded space, fewer and fewer of the Jihad ships survived.
Emerging from her daze, Norma realized that the expansive rooftop was bathed in artificial light from blazing glowglobes. Adrien was nearby, watching her, looking worried. She wondered how long he had been there. The sounds of manufacturing and testing suddenly came sharp and loud across the shipyard.
“So many casualties.” Her throat was dry and raspy. “They can’t see where the spacefolders will take them, and so they are lost. Too many brave fighters for the Jihad, too many innocent prisoners on the Synchronized Worlds. My ships. My failure.”
Adrien looked at her with dark eyes full of stoic resignation. “It is another price of this long and bloody war, Mother. When the Jihad is finally over, we can get back to business.”
Still, all through the night, she heard the screams of the dying as they echoed through— and between— space.